I is for Inclined Plane, Chapter 2

Happily, I lost my bet. Charlie arrived nine and a half minutes early.

We took advantage of the walk over to Green Street to describe the massive traffic jam that I'd encountered trying to go through security at the airport. It had been annoying at the time, but the silver lining of bad experiences is that you can either use them to garner sympathy or laughs. I confess, I was going for a little of both here.

Charlie had a few amusing travel disasters of his own to relate. Yet, somehow, after we were seated and had given our orders, our conversation dried up abruptly.

I sighed.

"So, what should we discuss?" Charlie asked.

"Other people's love lives?" I suggested jokingly. I should have known better.

"Since we have none to speak of?" Charlie asked wryly.

"Well, you haven't since Susan Berry visited," I said snidely. I could have bitten my tongue.

Charlie stiffened. "You and Marshall Penfield seemed to be having a fine time, too," he retorted.

My jaw must have hit the table.

"I had two meals with him…" I started to say as Charlie held up his hands in a placating manner.

"Wait, stop. I'm sorry," he blurted. "That was uncalled for. You don't owe me any explanation. We weren't dating then. I don't own you."

I reached across the table and put my hand over his mouth. "Okay, stop, one cliché per apology is sufficient."

He blinked at me.

"For the record," I added, pulling my hand away. "I was never interested in Penfield in any romantic sense. I looked him up on the internet after we met and thought his paper on deep set theory might prove useful. I spent most of those meals picking his brain."

Charlie relaxed a little. "It did prove invaluable in that home invasion investigation," he admitted, just a trifle grudgingly.

I had to tell Charlie the other topic of conversation. "At least, when I could get him to stop talking about you."

Charlie's eyes went wide and his face turned pink. "You were talking…?" He pointed to himself.

I nodded.

He looked down at the table and unwrapped his silverware from his napkin. "I was jealous, I'm sorry."

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. "I wasn't real happy about your 'Berry Phase,'" I admitted.

His head popped up and his eyes went wider. "My… my…?" He gaped at me. "You're making puns about her?"

My mouth twisted to one side. "Humor is a coping mechanism," I said by way of explanation.

"Ah, right." Charlie was obviously casting around for something to say. "I'm sorry."

"I'm the one who said that I wanted to focus on my studies instead of my social life," I said.

Charlie dropped his eyes and gave a snort of laughter. "Sounds like a feeble way to rationalize my actions," he said.

I reached across the table and patted his arm. "It's okay. We're both utter crap at this relationship stuff. How about we just move past Penfield's jealousy and Berry's stupidity and concentrate on us?"

Charlie looked at me without raising his head. "Why are you calling Susan 'stupid'?" he asked with a slight frown.

I sniffed. "Well, she had two shots at you and passed," I said. "She obviously can't be the sharpest knife in the drawer."

Charlie dropped his eyes back to the table just as the waiter slid his Pasadena Steak Sandwich onto the table.

I leaned back to allow the waiter put my asparagus and spinach penne pasta on the table in front of me. This seemed like an excellent time to change the subject.

"You remember that Fleinhardtian story that I mentioned?" I asked.

Charlie nodded, but didn't speak. A Pasadena Steak Sandwich in not something a normal human can talk around.

"Well, I didn't spend my entire vacation shopping and sight-seeing," I said.

Charlie nodded, swallowed and said, "Right, right, there was a certain amount of time devoted to dodging That-Banker-from-Goa, right?"

I flicked a chuck of asparagus at him. It landed on his plate and he ate it.

"Smart aleck," I said.

"Thank you," he replied blandly.

I laughed.

"You were going to do some volunteer work Habitat for Humanity again, weren't you?"

I nodded, pleased that he had remembered.

"We could put it on the itinerary for our trip, too," I said, thinking about the improvements that he had made to his house. "You're good with your hands."

"Thank you," Charlie said. "So, did your grandmother go with you? When did you go?"

"Yes, Grandmother went with me," I started in on my pasta. "She's in good shape, and she likes to keep an eye on my cousins and me. She doesn't think 'girls' our age should be running around without an escort."

"The old fashioned type?"

"In India," I replied. "She doesn't worry about me as much in the States." I shrugged.

"When in Rome…" murmured Charlie.

I smiled at that. I suppose it did make sense for my grandmother to be more old-fashioned in an old-fashioned setting. "Anyway, doing the house building last turned out to be a good plan."

Charlie nodded encouragingly as he took another bite of his sandwich.

"I was tired enough to actually sleep on the plane home," I said. "Also, I was sore afterwards and it's much nicer being sick in my own bed."

"You poor thing," Charlie said. He reached across and patted my hand. He also filched an asparagus bit. "You in the market for a personal massage therapist?"

He said that with such a hopeful expression on his face that I felt myself turning pink. I ducked my head and focused on my pasta. I'd been daydreaming about Charles Eppes since that first combinatorics class, but it was still flustering to realize that he was inclined to dream about me!

"I didn't know you knew massage therapy," I said.

"You're the one who said that I was good with my hands," Charlie answered with a small smirk.

I peeked up at him. He waggled his eyebrows. I winked. We went back to eating.

"Anyway, this last time, we had a near catastrophe during our house-building expedition," I went on.

"What happened?" he asked.

"The British had a saying that Madras had three seasons, 'hot', 'hotter' and 'bloody'ell'."

Charlie laughed.

"Well, we weren't there in the 'bloody'ell' season," I said. "And the sea breezes generally make the weather bearable. However, it's usually advisable to not do strenuous activities between noon and two."

Charlie squirted ketchup on his fries and I helped myself to one and smirked at him.

"So, en route to the village where we would be building houses, we stopped for lunch and a siesta. We volunteers were in Land Rovers. The equipment was being transported in two old army trucks. Really old army trucks with canvas tops and huge winches and a tendency to overheat during the hottest part of the day."

Charlie nodded and shoved his plate at me, but I declined any more French fries.

"There are no rest areas, so we just stopped along the road," I said

Charlie squirted out more ketchup and nodded. "Not likely to inconvenience anybody if nobody is moving," he said.

"Right," I agreed. "Besides, most people out there didn't have big trucks, so by parking on the side, we left enough room in case somebody did actually come." I paused to eat more pasta.

"It was a moot point, as nobody came," I said. "The problem was that one of the trucks was poorly parked. Not that the driver could have known that he was picking a bad place. We were all enlightened on this point when the road collapsed and sent his truck down into a ravine."

"Your big opportunity to show off your math chops," Charlie said, eyes sparkling.

"I almost missed it, because at first, I didn't see how I could help. I mean, the truck was on a slope, which would act like an inclined plane, but it wasn't going to help enough under the circumstances."

"Both trucks had winches, right?" Charlie asked.

"Yes," I replied. "And they were capable of winching one ton each."

"Ah, and the trucks weighed?" Charlie catches on quickly.

"Two tons."

"Ouch," Charlie said.

"Exactly."

"What angle was the truck at?" Charlie asked.

"It looked around forty-five degrees, maybe forty-three degrees." I indicated the angle with my hands.

Charlie laughed and ran his fingers through his curly hair. "Meaning you only needed 1.4 tons of winching power."

"And we still only had one," I said, holding up a forefinger.

"So then what?"

"Well, they were debating about how to salvage the equipment. They decided to send the first truck ahead, unload it, and then bring it back for the equipment on the second truck."

"But you spared them the effort by doing something especially clever and worthy of Larry?" Charlie guessed.

I felt my face heat up. "What makes you say that?" I asked.

"You're very resourceful," he said.

My face must have been cherry red by then.

I nodded. "Thank you. Anyway, I was wandering around handing out water bottles and I came across my cousins braiding each other's hair while they waited."

Charlie nodded as he finished off his sandwich.

"So I asked if the fallen truck's winch still worked."

Charlie's eyes brightened and I knew he'd jumped ahead to the resolution. But he didn't step on my lines. That's one of many things that I love about the man.

"I explained to the man in charge that they could entwine the cables of the downed truck with the truck still on the road. When they did that, they had two tons of winching power, when they only needed 1.4 tons. The two winches synchronically rewound and pulled the truck up the incline."

Charlie mimed applause. "Excellent," he said.

Okay, I preened. It was nice to impress my cousins. It was even nicer to impress Charlie.

A grin flashed across Charlie's face and he reached across the table to pat me on the forearm. Then he cocked his head curiously. "Okay, you said this was a Fleinhardtian type story," he said.

I nodded and pushed my pasta around and decided that I'd had enough.

"The clever part I see," Charlie said. "But what's the Fleinhardtian moral to this tale?"

I felt a smirk cross my face. It's not often that I can stump Charlie. "C'mon, you can figure out the moral to the story."

He tilted his head and studied me narrowly. He dropped his eyes to his plate and gestured to his fries. I shook my head and kept smirking.

Then he figured it out. "So what you're saying is that we have the tools to make our relationship work. We just need to… pull together."

I leaned over the table and he leaned towards me.

"Do you think we can make this work?" he asked.

"I'm inclined to believe so," I replied.